Read Online Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue by John McWhorter - Free Book Online

started are, to the experts, not worth extended engagement.
    But following changes in English starting from when they hit the ground in casual speech is a luxury available only from documents dating from when English was written more or less as it was spoken. Old English was almost never written that way. The Celtic impact must be embraced in the frame of mind of, say, a paleontologist who reconstructs the behavior of dinosaurs from fragmentary but indicative clues.
    There are pathways of footprints left by herds of sauropod dinosaurs, the Brontosaurus (okay, Apatosaurus) type, in which smaller footprints run in the middle while the bigger ones run along the sides. Paleontologists have inferred from this that younger sauropods were protected by being flanked by the big older ones, as among some animals today. We will never have film to prove this, and most likely will never resurrect sauropods with DNA and watch them do it. Yet it is accepted that the paleontologists’ reconstruction is a valid approach to the evidence available, and almost certainly correct.
    The likenesses between Celtic languages and English are a similar case. Realities of the history of writing among human beings in ancient semiliterate societies make it impossible that we would find meaningless do in Old English documents like Beowulf , the Lindisfarne Gospels, Aelfric’s Colloquy, or Cædmon’s Hymn, even if meaningless do was being used casually every day all over England. Yet the presence of the same feature in Welsh and Cornish, and its absence used this way anywhere else in the known world, make treating it as something that just happened all by itself in English seem almost strange.
    Overall, scholars of English’s history are less resistant to than uninterested in the impact of Celtic. The reason, one senses, is that charting how Celtic languages shaped English does not involve using the tool kit they are accustomed to. These scholars are trained to examine aspects of English grammar that really did emerge by themselves and were never thought of as “bad” or “peculiar,” and thus were committed to the page not long after they got going.
    Going is, in fact, a good example, in the going to future marker, English’s alternate to good old will . This is the kind of thing English specialists love to sink their teeth into. In Old English, there was no such thing as using the word for go to put a verb in the future as in I’m going to think about that . Go was about going somewhere and that was that. Even as late as Shakespeare, at the end of the 1500s, go still meant go . In Two Gentlemen of Verona , the Duke asks Valentine, “Sir Valentine, whither away so fast?” and he answers, “Please it your Grace, there is a messenger that stays to bear my letters to my friends, and I am going to deliver them (III, I, 54-57).” Valentine means that he is literally going in order to deliver the letters.
    However, if you are going in order to do something, then automatically what you are going in order to do will actually occur in the future. As such, Valentine’s statement could be taken as meaning that his delivery of the letters will occur in the future—that is, that he will deliver the letters. Because of that ever-looming implication of futurity whenever one said going to , after a while going to started to actually mean the future rather than actual going.
    It is about fifty years after Two Gentlemen that Charles I, amid the crisis that would soon cost him his head, rallied the gentry of Yorkshire saying, “You see that My Magazine is going to be taken from Me.” (Poor Charles, for the record, was not complaining that he was to be deprived of his Sports Illustrated ; by magazine he meant “arms depot,” more pertinent to his situation.) This was a usage of going to that was not literal—the arms depot could go nowhere. Going to here had become a future marker like will , and wouldn’t you know, around the same time in 1646, a